For Charles Pillitteri, the fight against fraudsters began when he discovered fake bottles of his Canadian ice wine in Taiwan in 1998.
He tried everything to safeguard his product from counterfeiting, from 22-carat gold to invisible ink, only to realize that none would protect the consumer at point of purchase.
The proprietor of Pillitteri Estates Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, in the Canadian province of Ontario, found his solution in a bottle-top silver bubble seal that is impossible to copy.
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health
Photo: AFP
“It gives us authenticity, traceability, integrity and customer satisfaction,” Pillitteri said at the recent Vinexpo wine industry fair in Bordeaux.
REAL DEAL
The system — developed by Prooftag, a French firm that specializes in brand security — is among several technologies that vintners are embracing to foil fraudsters and reassure consumers that they are buying the real thing.
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health
Photo: AFP
With Prooftag, a consumer armed with an iPhone, a downloaded software application and Internet access can authenticate a wine in seconds, even while standing at the wine-store shelves.
“It’s easy. You take your iPhone, take a shot of the datamatrix code and it takes you to the Web site and it shows you a picture of the bubble pattern for the bottle you are looking at,” Pillitteri said. “If you break the seal, all the bubbles are broken, the seal is gone and you can’t copy it.”
Android and BlackBerry versions of the app are due out by end of the year.
Ice wine, a sweet dessert wine made from grapes frozen on the vine, is one of the most counterfeited wines in the world, particularly in Asia where it is a prestigious gift item.
“The bubble code creates a direct link between the final consumer and the brand holder and restores confidence,” Prooftag chief executive Clement Kaiser said.
Curiously, the bubble seal began as a failed product intended for the semi-conductor industry.
“We applied an adhesive, a polymer and the fault appeared — the bubbles,” Kaiser said. “The electrical properties were not consistent. We were not able to overcome the problem, so we stopped research for semiconductors.”
Exploiting the flaw, Prooftag sought ways in which its patented technology might prove useful — and the wine industry, struggling with counterfeiting, was the answer.
Prooftag now sells bubble seals to winemakers in Canada, France, South America and the US state of California.
With Asian demand for Bordeaux wine growing, more and more of the region’s estates are investing in bubble seals, Kaiser said, as well as other options that draw on smartphone technology.
MULTILINGUAL
The Bordeaux Wine Council took advantage of this year’s Vinexpo to unveil an anti-fraud feature on its Smart Bordeaux application, which comprises a database of more than 8,200 Bordeaux labels in a dozen languages.
“For Smart Bordeaux, we began with the label so the consumer can see if the label even exists,” said Christophe Chateau, a spokesman for the Bordeaux Wine Council, an industry group.
If con artists alter the name of a vintage slightly, say from Chateau Lafite to a whimsical “Chatreal Lafiteau,” he said, a Chinese consumer may not discern the difference — unless they can check the label against the database.
The Smart Bordeaux app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times already, with Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans accounting for a quarter of those.
Another option for beating the fraudsters is SpySeal, produced by another French company, Advanced Track and Trace (ATT), a trademark protection specialist based outside Paris.
“SpySeal is both visible and invisible,” ATT project manager Eric Dardaine said.
The visible sticker has a datamatrix code that can be scanned with a smartphone, which then links to an Internet site — but it also includes secret invisible indicators of tampering or fraud.
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